[papreclip]

The one student who got caught for plagiarism when I was a TA was busted by turnitin. Maybe the tool isn't perfect but it caught this student who had painstakingly replaced every single word in a copied paper with a synonym. I'm talking "perhaps the utility is not flawless, but the use of this utility allowed for the apprehension of a pupil who..." etc.

I was surprised at the level of effort

[joe5150]

So it either only caught a single cheater among some unknown number, or only a single student cheated? Neither case seems to justify the expense and hassle of subjecting everybody to this process, not to mention everything else wrong with TurnItIn.

[KittenInABox]

I'm always shocked at how much students will put in effort simply not to do an assignment given. I guess this is just part of what you will get when you attach cultural and economic worth to a set of hoops to jump through [even if the intent is to have institutions of knowledge, sadly I think many students just see it as a way to get economic stability].

[christianqchung]

Unrelated to the cheating part, if you don't see American colleges primarily as a path to economic stability, I think you are probably either rich that it doesn't matter or haven't seen the bottom 25% outcomes of college graduates who didn't treat it as a financial opportunity/investment and are struggling.

[falcor84]

More likely that they used something like quillbot or grammarly for automatic paraphrasing.

[papreclip]

This was about 15 years ago

[ffsm8]

grammarly is pretty old, Not sure when it became available, but it was already pretty well established as a high quality writing assistant by ~2012.

It had various tools and heuristicsv to suggest different phrasings and better words that were pretty incredible if compared to anything else back then